Smoothness and Dance
Photo: Barbie Robinson
The beautiful by far exceeds the pleasurable.
-Byung-Chul Han
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes powerfully about our addiction to “smoothness”, which has subsumed even the previously transgressive domains of artistic practice. The ability to express all of reality as beauty, which was the radical proposition of art, has now become about expressing what makes us feel smooth and comfortable. The smoothness addiction has also pervaded the realm of spiritual inquiry.
Often people speak to me of how they yearn to be peaceful, still and undisturbed. And this is a need that requires to be addressed. Most spiritual paradigms propose this as the central objectives of their traditions. We do need times of quietude, stillness and rest to survive.
The problem is when these become the only lenses on spirituality. How do we navigate a complex, unstable, unpredictable, Reality when we only value smoothness and comfort?
I reflect on this because I see how the popular understanding of spirituality as smoothening of life affects a spiritual practice such as dance. Especially in the West, dance has very low value as a serious modality, even among the arts. There is a divorce between dance and serious philosophical and spiritual inquiry that is profound and pervasive.
As a dancer in India, to consider my dance my spiritual practice was not a radical position. The Rasa approach to spirituality considered all artistic practices as powerful ways of invoking the Divine, no less in importance than any other tradition. However, even Indian dance has not been immune to the smoothness addiction that has swept humanity. What is beauteous has mostly become what is sublimated to a point of frictionlessness.
Yoga has become the iconic embodied approach to spirituality. The popularity of Yoga speaks to the hunger for including the body in our spiritual paradigms. While in no way reducing the importance of Yoga, the ubiquity of Yoga has repercussions for dance as a spiritual modality. There is an assumption that any embodied spirituality must look and feel like Yoga.
Indian dance is of the sensations. The seminal text on Indian dance, the Natya Sastra, states that everything in Reality is to be embraced by dance. There is no duality-based curating of experiences. In other words, the good, bad and ugly, are all worthy of being danced.
The physicality of such an approach is not “smooth”. In fact, movement itself emerges from instability. Dance is not just movement but the expression of the experience between beginnings and endings. This can be called flow, but the word flow has been associated with “smooth” in our times. Flow can be smooth, or unstable, or sudden, or intermittent, or irregular. Dance is how the fullness of the nature of Reality is expressed in the fullness of all of its sensations—fear, rage, pleasure, wonder and pathos.
I see that when people seek to approach dance as a spiritual inquiry, they think it must be smooth. The confluence of polarities which makes an expression dance, is lost in this quest for smoothness. Shiva, the ancient invocation of dance, was a union of polarities in all respects. The dancing body itself was beyond the masculine-feminine duality, and therefore the dance itself was beyond all dualities.
Non-duality is inherently unstable and has friction in relation to our usual ways of being and moving. Therefore, the unit of dance is Karana which means to bring into form, to act and to make. There is an interface proposed here of expression in the world, and implicit in the word is friction in the act of bringing into form. The expression requires transformation through the constellation of artistic practice to render that friction beauteous. Consider for example that the unit of Yoga is asana which means to bring to a rest, to make resident, to find one’s “seat”. This is a very different domain of physicality to a Karana.
And these traditions are different because they each offer us a richness and wisdom and different ways of connecting to the Divine depending on our innate temperament. It is our marginalisation of dance that makes its unique intelligence invisible and unworthy of devoted attention and respect.
The beautiful does exceed the pleasurable, but ancient Indian dance knew the alchemy of removing conditionality of beauty, and thereby rendering all experience as worthy of our passionate and beauteous expression.